


In the Heavens Write Your Glorious Name

by akathecentimetre



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, Oneshot Series, mythos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of TFA-inspired oneshots; will often explore/experiment with a lot of mythos and reach back to previous generations. <b>MAJOR SPOILERS.</b></p><p>1 – What’s in a name? 'Ben' had always meant too much.<br/>2 – Finn barely knows what touch is, except that he needs more of it.<br/>3 - Poe has had many heroes.<br/>4 - Finn is pretty sure he knows what a practical joke is. He's also pretty sure that what the shadier corners of the Resistance get up to does not fit into that category.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

*

Luke doesn't talk much, in Rey's first weeks with him. There's a lot of grunting involved, and rusty vocal chords, and strange, sudden intakes of breath, full of surprise, as though he still startled by her presence and what she's asked him to do.

When he does speak he asks about Kylo, mostly, though he doesn't use that name. It hadn't taken her long to figure out exactly what that fatal encounter had met – a few whispered words with Leia, long-dormant feelings of _family_ and _father_ bubbling up to her through the strange miasma that is the Force. She knows that that means Luke is his uncle, and that something went wrong between them, but if she's honest, she's still too raw from Han's loss (and knows that that rawness is dangerous, that these exposed, aching nerve endings need to be healed before she allows them fester) to want to know much more.

But if Luke talks, he wants to talk about Ben – and so she listens. Ben as cautionary tale, Ben as regret; Ben as hatred and failure and that last, lingering moment of hope.

“I named him, you know,” Luke says, one very early morning when the sky is still red with sunrise and she can barely see him as they meditate, or try to, on a freezing crag. “I suppose that was my fault too.”

“Han and Leia didn't – ?”

“Well,” Luke says, and it is one of the rare occasions when he has smiled, his rough face creasing into hills and valleys. “Even before their estrangement, they were rather good at arguing with each other. Leia threw up her hands and said I had the honor, since they couldn't agree.”

Rey suspects there might be more to the story than that, but she's always been good at waiting for the truth, so she decides not to ask. The question she does voice, in the end, is one she's been asking a lot since she arrived, ever-conscious of time running at her back, telling her she needs to hurry, pulling her back in reprobation if she goes too fast to understand what she's doing. “Why is it important? His name?”

Luke keeps a book in his little pile of belongings, scattered around the cave where he sleeps like the most stereotypical of hermits. It is handwritten, a roughly- but neatly-bound manuscript, and bears an embossed K on its spine.

“Oh,” Luke says, almost carelessly. “He's named after my Master. Though Ben wasn't his name, either, when it came down to it.”

It takes nearly another week for Rey to hear the full story, and it comes in fits and starts and makes her weary, so weary, like the stories she had loved as a child and had clung to during her lonely nights of dreaming on Jakku have been carefully carved apart by a lightsaber, like they have been dealt the same scars and wounds she left on Kylo himself.

“I used to tell him,” Luke says – “I used to tell him about Ben.”

I used to tell him about Ben, Luke says: Ben who suffered such great losses as would kill lesser beings. Ben who lost everything he cared about, everyone he loved, and still had the strength to smile. Ben who left behind the little book, whose hand never wavered even when he was writing of nightmares and ghosts and hauntings, about the pain, about the shame he should never have had to own. About the weight of fate, and his wondering whether, in bequeathing any part of his own quest onwards, he was doing the right thing.

Ben the best of Jedi, and one of the best of men, Luke says.

“I used to tell Ben all about him,” Luke says, and his voice goes slow and deep – and Rey wonders, when she curls into a ball and shivers into sleep, whether he had known, even at the time, the sabotage he was weaving.

She dreams of a desert that is not her own, and of a small figure standing in its dunes, upright, lonely, bereft. Grieving.

All she has is her name. It is all that she is, perhaps all she will ever be, and she is proud to own it. And so though she despises him, though she cannot find it in her heart yet, as she knows she must eventually, to accept him for what he is (but not forgive, never forgive, she will never be as selfless as that) –

She pities Kylo Ren, from her solitary bed, for the weight of history he was expected to bear.

And somewhere, she thinks – she knows – the shade of Obi-Wan Kenobi is sorry, too.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spenser's _Amoretti_ , Sonnet 75:
> 
> ONe day I wrote her name vpon the strand,  
> but came the waues and washed it a way:  
> agayne I wrote it with a second hand,  
> but came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.  
> Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay,  
> a mortall thing so to immortalize.  
> for I my selue shall lyke to this decay,  
> and eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.  
> Not so, (quod I) let baser things deuize,  
> to dy in dust, but you shall liue by fame:  
> my verse your vertues rare shall eternize,  
> and in the heuens wryte your glorious name.  
> Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,  
> our loue shall liue, and later life renew.


	2. Chapter 2

*

When Finn wakes up, Poe is holding his hand. 

Well, not quite. Being asleep tends, Finn is pretty sure, to render one's actions subconscious at best. But he's _there_ , and so is his hand, and the slightest puff of snoring air across Finn's wrist below the slump of jumpsuit-clad shoulders. 

Finn waits. Ponders. Thinks: Rey said I didn't need to. But he'd wanted to – oh, he'd _wanted_ to, just to know what it felt like when he had an excuse to do it, and wasn't just lying in his impersonal bed on the Starkiller and waiting, petrified, with his arm dangling over the edge towards the bunk below as though eager to sin. 

Someone had reached up, once. He hadn't known their name, or even their designation. They'd touched his fingertips in the darkness, hesitant, curious. And then, as though frozen, they'd snatched their own hand away, as though thinking even this smallest of trespasses was to be punished with hellfire, or worse. 

He remembers Phasma's voice, often, telling him never to remove his helmet – never remove his gloves, and if he had to strip out of his armor for any reason he was not to remove the underarmor of clinging black, and even that could only happen in the privacy of cubicle cleaners. Sonic existed for a reason, after all. He had very little idea what his _own_ skin looked like, and he'd rapidly outgrown the ameliorating pity he'd harbored somewhere for the Captain herself, likewise imprisoned. 

He'd grabbed Rey's hand, and thought: it's rougher than I would have imagined. Sand-blasted to a rasping, delicate grain. It was only then that he'd become aware of just where his own blisters were: proof of using a blaster, little more. 

He'd always expected – or rather hoped, for expectation of anything beyond the victory of the First Order was forbidden – that it would mean something, to touch someone with intention. Briefly, ever so briefly, he'd reached backwards, in the cockpit of the TIE fighter: in a moment of shrieking about something desperate, found Poe's shoulder, clutched it, felt muscles happily rippling below torn cloth. He was the same on D'Qar, so giving with it, gathering Finn up as though it was nothing, as though it was  _normal_ , as though he'd known Finn all his life and they were of the same flesh. 

Rey didn't let go of him. She was sweaty and fast and he could hear her pulse vibrating in her veins, and when she leaned over him in the snow and sobbed she was cold. He could feel the chill of her fingerprints like a brand against his neck. 

Poe stirs, his fingers tighten, and Finn can tighten his in response, and they are both possessed of a dry heat; his from the dehydration of injury, Poe – Finn suspects – because he simply works that way, light-footed and quick to sensation. 

“Buddy,” Poe smiles, hoarse and blinking. He leans upwards; squeezes Finn's hand, puts one of those slim palms on Finn's forehead. “About damn time.” 

 _Stay_ , Finn wants to say, and since it's pretty clear he can't speak he is more grateful than ever for Poe's prescience, as the pilot shifts where he sits, puts his elbow sleepily on one closed fist propped up on the bed – and strengthens, rather than releases, the grip he has with the other. 

“So,” Poe drawls, as his thumb presses assuredly into the joint of Finn's. “You won't _believe_ what we've heard from Rey...” 

This is it, Finn decides: this is all it is, his hand being held. 

All he needs in the galaxy, right here, found and kept. 

*


	3. Chapter 3

*

It hadn't been difficult for Poe to pick up heroes, when he was young. His collection started at home (wherever 'home' turned out to be that particular month), whenever he saw his mother in her flight gear, or whenever he saw his father in his fatigues. He went to bed with his head spinning in dreamy circles, cycling in and out of battles, ones where Dad saved Mom and Mom saved Dad, and the air was full of blaster light and smelled like fire; he was born on Yavin 4, he knows, in between campaigns, making him the product of all those stories made real. It was just how it was, and he loved it, and he lived in a world full of myths that he didn't care to let go of. 

Warnings made real: that had hurt, when he was sixteen and flew cover in his first squadron, and under heavy enemy fire the X-wing in front of him burst and peeled silently into pieces left crystallized blood and iron spread out across the outside of his cockpit. He'd veered, lurched, swayed his way back into formation, and when he'd finally landed back at base he put his head down between his knees - his helmet was too big for him, his chin slid easily out of its straps - and choked out his meager breakfast onto his boots. They'd warned him, his Mom and Dad: they'd told him even heroes die, and he'd told himself he could take it. 

And so he'd wiped his mouth, and gotten out of the X-wing, and took half an hour, later that night, to etch, with shaking hands, the name of the fallen pilot into the hull, behind the seat, where no one else could see - where no one else would think to look, and scratch it out. 

Han is an easy hero. Han Solo, twelve parsecs (it doesn't make sense and that's why Poe loved it), shot first, fell in love with a princess. Until he turned twenty, Poe only knew the Generals from afar, and it was perfect. Missing his mother, he hung on Organa's every word, loving that she was in charge, loving that he, Dameron, could do something for her; missing his father, he looked at Solo, and knew that they had a son, too, somewhere, and that maybe one day, when the war was won, he could walk up to the man on equal terms and say hey - do you need someone new for your crew? I can fly pretty damn good. I'll give you a trip. 

It's a quiet few years, after the massacre. The Resistance scatters, reeling, and Poe finds himself in the Outer Rim, and it takes him a long time to realize that the young men and women he has under his command (it's fucked up, all of it, considering he's only six months older than them on average) think _he's_ a hero.  

He lives and breathes the X-wing, and he doesn't quite understand it - how is it that what comes most naturally to him, simply what he _is_ (not, never what he _does_ ), is worthy of this? 

While on his way back to D'Qar, at the age of twenty-five, he hears that Han Solo has not been seen by any member of the Resistance since It happened. Sitting in the quiet of hyperspace, he thinks, with the conscious arrogance of someone too willing to die, that only cowards can't face the truth. 

By the time he lands and finds General Organa (dependable, breakable, _real_ General Organa) on the pad, waiting for him and the rest of the returning squadron with open arms, he's promised himself that he'll allow himself the leeway to be his own hero, for a little while. It's what he'll need, he suspects, to stay alive.  

Gods, but Finn. How did Finn even _think_ to -  

He finds his next heroes so simply, when he is covered in blood and he hasn't slept and he seems to be dreaming while awake. Simple words, simple offers, embodying bravery unbounded. 

The creation of myths starts, he learns, not with those who expect heroism, but those who don't even know what it means. 

And so he flies Finn the fuck out of there, and nearly loses his footing when he sees Rey standing sobbing in Leia's arms, and thinks: a hero is only a hero if someone thinks they are. 

And damn, but he's more than ready to oblige.

*


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on a prompt I got on Tumblr to the effect that "Poe has haters in the Resistance." I might have gone a little sideways on that... *G*

*

Finn had only been out of bed - well, out of traction, and there was a difference, but being out of bed entirely had immediately felt like the bigger victory - when he'd started to notice, with the suspicion of someone long and reluctantly trained to scrutinize each and every one of his fellows for any sign of disloyalty, that the Resistance was not as united as he had wanted to believe.

Most of the factions were easy to discern. Though the fleet's purpose had always been a military one, he realized very quickly that it had its faultlines between doves and hawks: between those, like General Organa, who were willing and cautious enough to play a long game with the remnants of the First Order and other scattered militias that were springing up in the Republic - and those who, either with the idealism of youth or the bitter, long-entrenched accumulation of hatred over decades, were fully ready to go in with laser cannons blasting and ask any and all questions later, and to the many hells with whomever, innocent or not, happened to stand in their way.

With so many years of similarity and (however twisted) comradeship behind him, however, it took Finn a good deal longer to understand just how pettily personal other little hatreds could be. The misconceptions and arguments that could blow up in the mess hall between tired, cranky, or fundamentally opposite beings; the jealousy, sometimes, and the sidelong looks, and the fear that uncertainty could bring, not knowing whether they'd be alive or dead to kick each other's ass again, or tell her this, or break off with them. The intricate webs of relationships made his head hurt, sometimes, and that was well before he even got to the conversations about who was _sleeping_ with whom.

(Maybe all that chaos is what makes them all _beings_ in the first place, makes them _human_ , he thought once. That was still kinda new to him. And sometimes, he'd thought that he'd rather do without it.)

Some of it, though, seemed not just petty but dangerous - and he didn't like it. He didn't like it when Poe would just laugh off a theft of something or other from his locker, or the fact that as they scrambled from base to base, things he'd kept close - things like the first droid maintenance kit he'd ever owned, which Finn had seen lovingly applied to BB-8 on an almost daily basis - vanished into the ether. He didn't like it when Poe and his pilots were the subject of practical jokes that denied them comfort or sleep in the most hectic of cycles, which everyone _else_ was certainly willing to complain about.

Finn hated it enough that he asked Poe about it, once, and it was all he could do to smile in exasperation at the look of pure befuddlement on his friend's face.

"You can't tell me you're _used_ to this kriffing stuff."

"Hey," Poe said, and when he slung an arm around Finn's shoulders his tone turned conspiratorial. "You're gonna tell me that you and your buddies in the Order didn't have ways to unwind that weren't a bit - wrong?"

"Well, yeah. Of course they were wrong. Because - " and that was a perfect opportunity, actually, to burst into an impassioned speech about the _rightness_ of regulations and rules and weirdly tight-knit brotherhood under circumstances, but Poe interrupted him halfway through with a laugh and a bear hug that made the scar along Finn's back ache from end to end, and that seemed to be that.

It was only a few cycles later when it all went wrong enough for Finn to be proved right, and he wished to every god he'd ever heard of that he could have been proved wrong, instead. If there was one thing Poe _wouldn't_ tolerate being interfered with, it was absolutely his wing of pilots and his ship - and when the one was scattered in the middle of a battle by several radios shorting out at once and the other, apparently under the instruction of some sort of computer virus that even BB-8 had missed, went careening off into space in entirely the wrong direction with all of its life support systems failing - well, that was proof enough to convince even the most easy-going of officers.

"Go," Leia instructed, keeping her worry tightly under lock and key except for her eyes, and waving Finn away. "We'll figure it out. We'll find them."

And so he left the fleet, with Poe's wing staggering haphazardly back towards it as they wrestled with their failing controls, and it took hours - _hours_ \- to catch up to the drifting X-wing, which, having finally run out of fuel, was drifting in no-man's space with its cockpit all fogged up with ice and BB-8 beeping soundlessly out into nothingness. When they finally got the ship dragged into the belly of their much larger recovery vehicle, it took all of Finn's returning strength to manually haul open the hatches - and just in time, because judging by the sulkily-flashing lights on his oxygen mask and the icicles in his hair, Poe wouldn't have lasted much longer.

"Buddy," he croaked, and sighed as Finn rapidly started to rub warmth back into his nerveless hands. "Some joke, huh?"

The wrath of Poe Dameron (and the woman who might as well have been all of their second mother, because Leia kept her promise) proved no match to the hasty concealment the traitors had tried to draw over their heads. What happened to them, Finn didn't much care - only that they were gone, and that they would stay that way.

"Hey, though," Poe did say, when they were back at base and his ears were losing the last of their blue tinge, and he was wearing most of both his and Finn's growing collection of jackets. "I did have this _great_ idea for a stunt we could pull on Rey when she gets back."

"On a Jedi? Really?"

"….I did not think that through."

"No, clearly not..."

*


End file.
